America is pushing the labour market to its limits

I can't speak to the software side, but in IT there is a deluge of applicants. Lots of folks retraining, or coming in with 2 years of online ITT Tech-knockoff training. On the mid-to-high level that stratifies very quickly -- once we started filtering by (verified) CCNP/CCIEs/other certs the pool of legit applicants shrank greatly, but there was still a lot of noise.

Anecdote from when I did hiring: we needed 1-2 network engineers, low-to-mid-level and posted on craigslist, plus went through a couple headhunters we've worked with. Engineer needed to be in Atlanta, NC, DC, or Philly (though we did consider NYC-based folks in a couple cases). We posted CL ads in those cities 4 cities (not in NYC) and mentioned that we were in the entry-to-mid-level range.

We got something like 600 applications in the first day, couple thousand before the end of the week. Many were from far away from those cities, including several from overseas. Several applicants were clearly under-qualified, though I was surprised to see the number of overqualified folks, easily 30-40 applications; 7-10+ years and related degrees and certs. We didn't hire the overqualified people -- some looked too good to be true, others we worried about jumping ship quickly or being difficult to manage -- but it definitely threw me for a loop. IIRC we settled for a CCNA with a Big State 4-year degree who had the lowest salary requirements; he stayed on for about 2.5-3 years.

But I agree, that's largely the jr developer problem / current condition. Nobody wants to hire them because MANY are horrible. I know because I was in camp with them... some can't operate a computer in a professional manner and they graduated with me...

I got lucky and finally got someone to seriously look at me and got a job.

In many software/services-based orgs, salaries/benefits/pensions etc. can add up to 50-60% of costs. If revenue isn't growing or the company doesn't need "premium" American talent, many (especially large orgs) will set up fake open positions, reject candidates while looking like they are searching, and instead put a hold on hiring, hire H1Bs, or hire overseas.

Just my 2c/observations, may or may not extrapolate out. But gives me a rational framework to explain why unemployment is low (labor market is "tight") and yet employees have little bargaining power and fewer and fewer profits accrue to labor vs. capital.

Edit: Just saw this article about IBM laying off expensive employees on the front page, which fits neatly into this framework - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-17/ibm-is-be...

Since then, filling important roles (at the grunt level) has taken longer, wages aren’t keeping up.

It’s almost as if it’s stupidly inefficient to have millions of workers negotiating all this on their own.

Open standards in employment make the whole process smoother. Waste less human hours. But also increase worker security, which our system has been trying to undermine to the benefit of corporate masters for decades

(Seriously; Alan Greenspan reported to Congress that growing worker insecurity was good for business during the Clinton admin)

Another reason you are not sent as a rejection letter, is because it looks bad on HR's end if you were rejected, only to get hired months later. It basically says to the candidate "Our first pick dipped out on us, we were desperate enough to go through the 2nd pool, called a bunch of people, you were our backup". HR doesn't care about you, just what works for their company.

Sending rejection letters takes effort and offers no short-term benefits from HR's standpoint. Also, it can get quite messy to manage emails, especially if HR is aggregating prospective candidates from different portals all to one email.(remoteok.io, indeed.com, glassdoor.com, careerbuilder, reactjsjobs.com, etc)

Email responses becomes difficult to manage since you get 100+ emails in your inbox daily, 95% of candidates being unqualified. HR might not be big enough to warrant a dedicated system or tooling for hiring. You can use builtin tools like indeed.com, but from my experience its slower than using email. If you want to get shit done really fast forwarding to an email is time-saving, simple, and cheap.

You can then take the best candidates there, put it in kanban / trello / notion task board, etc if its a multistage interview process.

Companies aren't going to care enough to blacklist you in some database unless you caused some serious offense to warrant this. I can only think of one company that might actually do this, and its Valve.

Also if you apply to the same company more than once, you might be dealing with the same recruiter. They might recognize your resume just from memory though

I know one person, she's a data analyst (2 years experience, +5 years of marketing experience) here in the bay area. hasn't been able to get a Data analyst job for 3 years now, even after applying thousands of jobs and interviewing dozens of times. Finally, she was forced to take an after school baby-sitting job for 17$/hour (bay area).

I can't speak to your personal situation, but speaking generally I think too many tech people over-value their technical skills. If all a company needs is a warm body that can code or patch servers they will hire a better coder in India for half the price. The number one differentiator is communication and social skills. At my job there are 4 main groups I talk to: local coworkers, India coworkers, management, clients. Being a person who can talk to all 4 of those groups is valuable. Being a person who can churn out code is not particularly valuable.

Communication, of course, starts on the resume. If you're not even getting calls, I would suggest getting some help on your resume. Hire a professional if you need to.

If your job history is a mess take a few crappy consulting gigs and then a year from now you can say, "I've been successfully consulting for a while but now am looking for a place to settle in." That way you at least look consistent.

If interviewing is tough for you, then do it more. If you have stable job put your resume out there and accept at least 2-3 interviews every 6 months. Even/Especially if you are happy with your current job. Not needing the new job takes the pressure off. The practice will be good for you and you never know, you might find an amazing opportunity.

They're not even trying to actually find people, they're just putting on a dog and pony show to qualify for H1Bs or to keep their contractors on edge.

Seriously? What is considered a decent burrito in this context? I guess I'm eating at all the undecent burrito places then because I've gotten huge burritos for <$10, and I thought they were good.

In the meantime plenty of good folks out there willing to get into it, but naw they won't take them.

Overall wages, especially at the low end, are typically last to increase because people don’t hop around jobs as much as they should and the social element makes it look bad if people ask for too many wage increases (e.g jobs) too quickly. Whereas prices for capital (land, commodities, equities, equipment), are allowed to rise and fall as quickly as the market allows so capital owners get to reap those gains while wage earners get “stretched”.

This sounds an easily defeatable measure. If I'm a politician and encourage the economy to dump all kinds of cheap, low-quality crap onto the market, I will, on paper, have greatly boosted the buying power of low-income households - except not in a way that will be helpful for them: They will have choice between an enormous range of cheap products, except they will all be low-quality and likely not what the members of the household are looking for.

> A stronger dollar, can mean higher buying power for imported products.

See other post. Additionally, this does not cover products or services you can't import, e.g. housing.

> The more you produce, means there's more stuff for everyone to buy and that drives the prices lower.

Except a lot of that stuff is not actually produced for the domestic market but exported. Also, between "we produce more" and "we lower prices" there are usually several layers of management who decide how to price products, which costs to pass on, which products to sell at a loss and which products to sell with a margin.

The lower your disposable income, the more your life will depend on that kind of strategic decisions, independently of what products you're able to buy at any particular point in time.

No, we cannot. Unemployment and wage increases could be perfectly positively correlated and still be completely consistent with EU wages rising faster in the US when the EU unemployment rate is twice the US rate.

All we can conclude is that the EU unemployment rate to wage increase function is not the same as the US function, so that a given level of unemployment does not result in the same rate of wage increases in the EU and the US.

There are huge social safety net differences between the EU and the US that might affect how urgent it is for an unemployed person to find a job, and so could affect what employers have to offer to get workers.

In the US, being out of work is a major disaster for many people. If you are in a state that has not expanded Medicaid, you may not be able to afford even the cheapest health insurance for more than a short time with no money coming in if, like many Americans, you do not have much in savings.

When it comes to workforce, the supply is directly related to the supply of people able to do a job. Across the entire country, a job that requires little to no training to do will enjoy a much larger supply of workers than a job that requires more skill and experience.

Then there are other factors that essentially cap wages by limiting the cost of a service, such as insurance. Auto insurance, for example, largely dictates the compensation level for repairs and consistently gets tighter and tighter. This means that no matter how effective you are as a mechanic, the business paying you has a limit on how it defines your value because it can't opt to simply charge more for your work.

This applies to other industries as well.

If wages are the "price" in the supply/demand formula, price fixing has to be taken into account.

The U-3 is exactly what it's defined as. In that sense, it isn't misleading.

It is misleading in the sense that it does not capture what unemployment actually is as it's a very narrow definition of unemployment.

>Given that EU wages have increased much more than US wages we can conclude that unemployment has very little to do with wage increases.

We can conclude from this that it may not be the only factor affecting wages, though I never made that claim to begin with.

One could argue that the reason wages increased in the EU is because it restricts the supply of workers. For example, strong unions could explain that.

Its like you are saying a helium balloon float and conclude gravity has been disproven.

This is like throwing away the law of conservation of energy because you found a perpetual motion machine instead of checking inside the machine for batteries.

For example, are we considering how the impact of workers too scared or financially unstable to leave their current job impacts supply? Or how outsourcing jobs, hiring people who can't legally work, and other such changes impact supply?

Where exactly? Surely not in western Europe, it's stagnating since the 80s. In the former soviet bloc for sure I agree.

Would you mind expanding on this point? It wasn't supported by your other assertions, and I'm curious how such a counterintuitive conclusion might be true.

That said - there is a reason to be optimistic about all of this. If this demand pressures pushes to increase wages it might provide enough of an incentive to create room for real reform here, as well as transparency around what is happening with benefits that could spur longer-term cost control fixes.

As another user mentioned, the U3 is a very narrow definition that is largely useful for measuring the cost of unemployment benefits, it does not give a true idea of the real unemployment rate.

This article goes into the differences and their relevance

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/080415/true-...

>The U-3 unemployment rate is a comparatively narrow technical measure that leaves out a whole swath of out-of-work people who are willing and able to take a job but who don't fit the narrow BLS definition of "unemployed." For example, a stonemason who wants to work but who has become discouraged by a lack of opportunity in the midst of a deep economic recession would not be included in U-3 unemployment. A marketing executive who is laid off at age 57 and stops scheduling new job interviews due to her experience of age discrimination would not be included in U-3 unemployment. A person who only works one six-hour shift per week because no full-time jobs are available in his area would not be included in U-3 unemployment.

This is a technology website, I find UX discussion pretty relevant since all these news sites have horrible UX, and it should be pointed out each time they fail at basic UX. They don't need 50 nag screens. They could put most of them on the side or the top of their page, including GDPR notices. The reason why they use these invasive and annoying nag screens is that browsers ended up blocking all these annoying window based pop ups at first place.

Online news media just can't learn their lesson.

But - should all this extra gear be necessary? It's fine for you and me, and everyone else here who understands all this stuff but what about the rest of the general population?

I think GP's point is fair, if you view it as constructive feedback rather than a criticism of the publication. I personally enjoy the economist but tend to steer clear of the online experience.

Now that's me, who is knowledgeable enough to work around the various glitches. What about the rest of the potential readership. This poor quality of execution is costing the economist circulation, therefore advertising revenue, and probably potential subscribers.

And it isn't every thread. It's usually the most egregious examples that people point out.

I think that as long as it's still possible to desperately search for a job and not find one, assistance should be available. e.g. https://twitter.com/ForgetAmnesia/status/1041720689311440897 https://twitter.com/ForgetAmnesia/status/1041729497895186432

But, also, talking it through does illuminate the question "Would we be better off with them unemployed and not, at least, gaining work experience?" ... Unsure of the answer.